How we communicate development
Verifiable maturity, explicit direction.
Available, Evolving, Next, and Exploratory describe maturity, not absolute priority or a delivery date. Technical planning still exists: capabilities evolve according to dependencies, risk, architectural impact, and evidence gathered during implementation and evaluation.
This direction is specific to Orion Core; Orion Impact’s institutional direction is described in About. Not publishing a date before it is defensible does not mean developing without direction. It means separating internal planning from external promise.
Available — a capability implemented and exercised. It exists in the code and has technical evidence, not just intention.
Evolving — an existing, working capability that remains an active target for improvement in quality, robustness, measurement, or coverage.
Next — work prioritized for the next architectural sequence. Not finished yet, but with motivation, dependencies, and a defined place in the system.
Exploratory — a direction under study. There is an architectural hypothesis or opportunity, but its final form depends on future evidence and may be reshaped or discarded.
Current state
A concise, verifiable snapshot.
This is a deliberately small view. It does not try to enumerate the whole architecture — only to place the main capabilities by the state they are in today.
Foundation, Runtime, and Ingestion underpin what the Core already runs: durable work, operational record, and turning documents into searchable context. Retrieval and RAG exist and work, and they concentrate the current quality effort. Identity and Orion Client belong to the next foundations required to expand the usable surface beyond the current API and Core. Specialized applications remain a direction under study.
- FoundationAvailable
- RuntimeAvailable
- IngestionAvailable
- RAGEvolving
- RetrievalEvolving
- IdentityNext
- Orion ClientNext
- VerticalsExploratory
Direction
Where effort is concentrated now.
The current direction is a technical sequence of dependencies — not a calendar. The order may change if the code reveals a different constraint.
We publish goal, milestone, and state. A goal is the technical property we want to reach. A milestone is the verifiable condition of completion. Dates and external commitments appear only when they are defensible.
Retrieval and RAG
Improve retrieval quality before adding cognitive complexity. The current path already combines dense retrieval, a lexical component, and reranking, but retrieval and RAG remain Evolving. The work includes strengthening lexical retrieval, objective evaluation, fusion/ranking, and context assembly.
Identity
Prepare identity independent of transport so authentication, authorization, and explicit scopes can exist without coupling the domain to FastAPI.
Orion Client
Build the common consumption layer on top of the Core, separating experience, workflows, and agents from the cognitive infrastructure.
Verticals
Specialized applications may emerge on Core + Client when there is a real problem and enough evidence to justify that specialization.
How we prioritize
Direction without turning planning into public promises.
The order of evolution is guided by what unlocks capabilities, reduces architectural risk, improves measurement, or corrects observed limitations. New layers do not land because they look sophisticated; they land when they buy a concrete property.
- Goal. Retrieval competitive enough to sustain RAG with traceable evidence.
- Milestone. Corpus-wide lexical retrieval and objective evaluation with reproducible metrics.
- State. Retrieval and RAG remain Evolving until that evidence exists.
See the Core from the inside
What underpins these states lives in the Orion Core architecture: Execution Runtime, ingestion, memory, and retrieval and RAG flows. The Core page shows what exists, how it fits together, and why those boundaries were drawn that way.
Explore Orion Core